My son is very much into Minecraft, and lately he especially likes the Creeper character. You know the one that comes close to players and explodes. So for his 9th Birthday I decided to make him a softie, as he loves stuffed toys and the ones in the shops were just too small.
I found an excellent tutorial from DucttapeNinja – Minecraft Stuffed Creeper Doll. Instead of using the suggested fleece I thought I’d be brave and try out faux fur for the very first time. I found some green faux fur from Spotlight, as well as some black felt for the face. I already had some stuffing in the cupboard, no idea what it’s origin, just that it was nice and soft.
Cutting Out
I recreated the pattern in metric measurements as all my rulers are metric, and I just cannot seem to get my head around imperial measurements so I did a quick conversion.
Cutting out faux fur (1cm seam allowance)
| Width | Height | Quantity | |
| Head (H1) | 11cm | 11cm | 6 |
| Body Front & Back (B1) | 11cm | 16cm | 2 |
| Body Sides (B2) | 6cm | 16cm | 2 |
| Body Bottom (B3) | 6cm | 11cm | 1 |
| Legs Sides (L1) | 6cm | 8.5cm | 16 |
| Legs Top & Bottom (L2) | 6cm | 6cm | 8 |
Cutting out felt (no seam allowance, just stitched down)
Cut out 2 eyes – 2cm x 2cm
Cut out mouth using following template
Construction
This was the first time I have used faux fur so I did a bit of Googling and the advice was:
- Use clips instead of pins
- Use a walking foot on the sewing machine
- Be aware of direction of fur. It should lay down flat top to bottom, back to front. Sew fur so it is laying down flat where possible.
- Universal 80 needle
I hand basted the felt face to one of the head pieces as pins or glue just wasn’t going to work with the fur. Then sewed them permanently by with an edge stitch.
Then I followed the tutorial instructions to create the head, legs and body. It’s important to reiterate that the body does not have a top piece, as it is hand sewn to the bottom of the head.
One thing I quickly learnt when working with fur is that it leaves a mess. As I was making this as a surprise for my son this meant doing it when he was at school and then vacuuming up all traces of fur.
There was quite a bit of hand sewing – closing the head and leg cubes, sewing the head and legs to the body. For all of these I used a double strand of polyester thread. The one area that doesn’t feel really secure is where the legs are sewn to the bottom of the body even though I went back and forth quite a bit in this area. This fur was quite long so it really was quite tricky to determine if I was actually sewing into the base fabric of the fur and not just into air.
Final Result
After about 6.5 hours and about AU$6 of supplies I have sewn a 33cm tall and 15cm wide Minecraft Creeper. Faux fur wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, but wow does it make a mess.
My son loves his creeper and you need to watch out in our house as occasionally it’s gets thrown at you as the creeper “EXPLODS”, all to much hilarity.
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